Lawrence Hryb (aka Major Nelson), director of programming for Xbox Live at Microsoft, on Tuesday announced the release date of the next Xbox 360 update in a blog post. The update, which will bring a raft of features, will be available next month. Hit the jump to find out the exact release date and other details.

Are you a BlackBerry PlayBook owner that’s frustrated by the lack of integrated email, contact and calendar apps? You aren’t the only one. Those are the number one complaints leveled against the device – or at least the complaints cited most often – but RIM said that it would push out an update in October that would add those clamored-for features. Well, it’s almost November already. Where’s that update? Turns out the timetable was a bit off. Today, RIM announced that the update won’t roll out until next February.

“I’m not dead!” It’s one of our favorite quotes in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” We don’t picture TouchPad owners shouting that from the rooftops, though. HP basically called the tablet (along with WebOS) dead in the water and tossed it on the shelves at $99 to clear inventory; after a fire sale like that, you can’t expect much ongoing support. But surprise, surprise! TouchPad owners aren’t quite dead to HP yet. The company has just released a WebOS update for the tablet.

Firefox’s relatively new rapid release schedule lets developers implement and unveil new features and updates quickly, but there’s one thing we hate about it. No, it’s not the headache it causes enterprise users, although that sucks, too. It’s the constant update notifications. Geez, Firefox needs to update again, we get it already! Fortunately, Mozilla gets that we get that, and they’re looking to move to silent updates sometime in 2012.

Conventional thinking says that it would take a beast of a program to break through the encryption spit out by the SSL/TLS protocol – that’s why it’s found in so many websites and browsers these days. Unfortunately, a pair of researchers say they’ve whipped up just such a program in the form of BEAST, or “Browser Exploit Against SSL/TLS,” and they plan on showing it off this Friday at the Ekoparty security conference. At least one company’s taking the threat seriously; Google plans on rolling out a Chrome update designed to confuse the BEAST and defend against its threat.

Microsoft routinely issues advance notifications for its monthly Patch Tuesday update days before it goes live, that's not unusual. But the Redmond software outfit typically doesn't reveal the full extent of the patches through official "bulletins" until the day of release, which makes the weekend leak highly unusual.

Whether you're an IT admin in charge of deploying Windows updates across your firm's entire department or simply a home user with a Windows rig or three, prepare yourself for what's coming tomorrow. Microsoft is giving advance notice that this month's Patch Tuesday will include 16 security bulletin, nine involving critical vulnerabilities. All told, Microsoft plans to patch up 34 vulnerabilities across various products.

Symantec recently pushed out a signficant product update for both its Norton Antivirus 2011 and Norton Internet Security 2011 products, bringing the version number to 18.6.0.29. Among the upgrades are a few new features (like support for Mozilla's Firefox 4 browser), performance enhancements, better compatibility with third-party programs, and a handful of bug fixes.

Adobe has announced the release of Flash Player 10.3 for Android, Linux, MacOS, and Windows. The latest stable release of Adobe’s ubiquitous plugin packs a bunch of new features and security enhancements. But its most notable user-facing feature is the ability to clear hitherto hard-to-delete Flash cookies, or local shared objects (LSOs) as they are formally known, from the comfort of the web browser’s privacy settings. Hit the jump for more.

Microsoft today posted an advance notification of a pair of security bulletins to be released on Patch Tuesday next week, including a "Critical" one that affects Windows and an "Important" one that affects Office. Windows Server 2003, Server 2008, Office XP, office 2003, Office 2007, Office 2004 for Mac, and Office 2008 for Mac are all affected by the bulletins, Microsoft said.